1. Reservation of Copyright
The disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office patent files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
2. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a system, method and interface for matching people with each other. More particularly, this invention relates to a computerimplemented method, system and interface thereto for matching people with each other according to desired characteristics.
3. Background
Matchmaking is an age-old art, made more and more necessary in this day and age by the demographic and cultural changes which make it difficult for likeminded people to meet. The social and family structures which help people meet each other are no longer available or acceptable to a large portion of society. Accordingly, it is desirable to have some sort of system which helps people meet each other.
There are systems which take some advantage of telephone technology to aid in this process. In these systems, a person wishing to meet another person must make a telephone call to a number and is then able to hear messages from others who are looking to meet people. In most of these prior systems, the user is able to select a category of people based only on gender preference. That is, a man looking to meet women makes one selection and listens to the appropriate messages, whereas a woman wanting to meet men would make a different selection to hear messages from men wanting to meet woman. Of course selections can also be made for men wanting to meet other men, women wanting woman and all sorts of other combinations.
However, in these prior art systems, once a person has made their gender preference selection, that person will have to listen to all appropriate messages. Most prior systems do provide the user with a way to skip or replay messages.
In most prior systems, each message comes from a particular person and has an identification, e.g., a box number, associated with it. Thus, in order for a user to contact the person who left a particular message, some systems provide users a way to reply to messages using the provided identification. For example, a system might say "This person is at box number 69, to leave a message for this person, press 69." Other systems do not indicate the box number to the user, and message replies are sent by pressing a particular key. For example, such a system might say "To leave a message for this person, press 1."
In general, prior art systems are little more than voice-mail systems with some additional control features added.
Proprietors of this type of system make money by either charging for subscription or by requiring parties to call the system using toll calls, e.g., from "900" numbers.
There are now some system which allow users to get some information about them from the World Wide Web (the Web). Typically these systems use the Web for advertising, and they do little more than direct users to a telephone system. While such a use make financial sense, it does not make good use of the power of the Web.